Tag: God loves you

Life ahead


Have you ever thought about where you will be after you die? Some of us do but there are many who don’t think about it or they don’t believe there is a “life after death” to look forward to or dread, whichever the case may be. God provided a way for us to have salvation from the penalty of sin, which is separation from Him. The only way for us to be in His Presence is to believe in Jesus for our salvation. No work can get you into Heaven and money has no place in Heaven. God loves each of us at such a depth that we cannot know His love until we are there.

The one other emotion that we feel here but rarely acknowledge is…JOY! I have read about people who have died and gone to Heaven for a little while then they were sent back with a bigger purpose for Him. They describe the feeling in Heaven as joyous and “like being surrounded by joy”. They even describe the trees and grass of Heaven having a part in the celebration of God. Your life in Heaven will be joyous and filled with praise and worship for God and His glory and His provision of eternity for the church, the Bride of Christ.

This doesn’t refer to a church/worship service like we know here but the type of worship of all of Creation. The birds know that God will feed them. The fish of the sea know that God feeds them and they rejoice in that knowledge. God loves you and He has prepared a place for each of us. I pray that more people will come to know Jesus as their Savior because the time is drawing near that the end of the age will come to an end soon. Be ready.

What is your foundation?


Do you believe in Jesus Christ? It is a concrete question and one that is hard to answer for some people. Many people believe that He existed and that the stories in the Bible are true to some extent but that is as far as many will go with their “belief”. The Bible is a book of stories. It is, in fact, a love letter to the world from God. It tells how He brought about the Jewish people to be a people and a nation. It doesn’t cover up the good or the bad that happened in the distant past, but it does give us hope for the future through Jesus Christ.

For those who believe in Jesus for their salvation, the hope that we look forward to is His coming back for the Church, His Bride, to be with Him forever. Will it happen as some books have portrayed, or will it happen as the Bible says it will? We don’t know the day or the hour and that is a good thing but it could happen at any time. It might be keyed to the last person to be saved and their decision to follow Jesus. Only God the Father knows when it will happen and it could be in a few minutes or a few days or weeks or even a few years from now. Your foundation will determine whether you will be in the group that is taken up or left on Earth to live through the Tribulation that is coming afterwards.

Your foundation is the belief-system that you live by. Whether you believe in Jesus Christ as your Savior or not will determine your position and your place after the rapture of the Church. I am not writing this to shame anyone, just to let you know that the Earth will be a very different place when this does happen. The Bible calls the Holy Spirit the “restrainer” and when the Church is taken up, He will be taken from the Earth as well. You might ask, “Why does this matter to me? I don’t believe in God or Jesus.” If you don’t believe then the world may not look much different to you when the church is gone, but it will get much worse in the days and weeks afterward.

The Book of Revelation tells about many things that will happen during the next seven years after the church is taken up. With the Holy Spirit gone, since He lived in the hearts of all of the believers, demonic forces and other evils will have free reign to do as they please. If you think the world is bad today, it will be much worse during the next seven years. Read the book of Revelation and seek out a pastor to help you understand what is coming because the news won’t tell you and it is likely that Bibles will be banned during this time, so find out about it today before it is too late. God has always cared about you and every person on Earth and He doesn’t want any to be sent to hell in the future but if you choose not to believe in Jesus as your Savior, then you will be in hell with Satan and his demons.

The Lord goes with you


Deuteronomy 31:8 KJV [8] And the LORD, he it is that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither be dismayed. https://bible.com/bible/1/deu.31.8.KJV

Wherever you go in life, God is only a prayer away. Why am I writing this today? Because there are many out there who need to hear it. God is closer than you think. He knows where you are and what is happening in your life every day, even if you don’t.

God loves each of us with a love that we can’t understand or even imagine. Life would not exist without Him and He is the Creator of everything and everyone so why not seek Him out and learn from His Word, the Bible. Today’s translations are very easy to read and understand so there isn’t a reason for anyone to say that the Bible is hard to understand. God does watch over us, even if we haven’t given our hearts to Him but He especially cares for those who have given their lives to Him.

I’ve been reading about some near-death experiences that people have had and some of them were Hindu or even Muslim and God still revealed Himself to them during that time. They did see what hell looks like but they were still given a choice to learn about their true Savior, Jesus Christ. The Man in a white robe came to give them a tour so they would know what was ahead depending on their choice.

Simple Christianity


Faith don’t need to be fancy. Holiness don’t need to be haughtiness. Ministry don’t need to be a misery. Wisdom don’t need to be wily. Christianity don’t need to be complicated…it just needs to be shared with those who need to know about it and the Savior that we, as Christians, follow.

Holiness sounds haughty but it refers to being “set apart” and as Christians we have to be in the world but, according to Scripture, we don’t have to agree with it and it’s ways. Being a follower of Jesus can be simply doing what He told His disciples to do, even when it conflicts with our life sometimes.

God loves us, all of us and for some that seems to be totally against their idea of God. But consider that He had a part in forming you in the womb and He knows your personality and your strengths better than you do. If you look around you in the world and at the heavens at night, God is bigger than all of your problems and He can handle all of them…if you will let Him. Even the little things like feeding the birds and the fish, He is involved in their lives as well. “Not even a sparrow falls to the ground without the Father’s notice.”

Where is God when I need Him?


How much do you need in this life? God gives us everything that we need every day but most of us take that for granted and we still wonder, “Where is God when I need Him?”. As someone who has grown up in America and has so-called “privileges” because I live here, I can tell you that those privileges are few. Some think that because I am “white” I have everything but I don’t. Life and friends can be cruel at times even when the “friends” don’t intend to be. Life is what we make of it or so I am told and in many ways that is true, but when you see many people who are wealthier than you are, don’t assume that their life is a happy one all of the time. Nobody can be happy every minute of every day regardless of the amount of money they have access to.

Joy, on the other hand, can be had by someone who lives in a cardboard shack. Why? Isn’t happiness and joy the same thing? Not by a long shot. Joy is not fleeting. It is a feeling that you can have just because you were able to get up this morning and walk to the kitchen. Many people in the world don’t have that blessing. Happiness comes and goes and depends upon your situation at the time. Joy can go on forever.

Where am I going with this? In many parts of the world poverty is so crushing that even having rags on your body may be all of the clothes that you have, and yet some of those who live in this situation are joyful because they are believers in Jesus. In America, we can’t imagine being impoverished to that point, yet there are some in our country who do live that way. 

God watches over all of us whether we are rich or poor, but many still don’t acknowledge Him as their Savior because when they felt the need for Him to intervene in some way for them, He did not. We can’t know why He didn’t heal or fix a problem or disease but He does. He may use a doctor or a prayer to heal but the answer is always up to Him. As Christians, we have access to Him all of the time but many of us allow the world to dictate when we seek Him. We try all kinds of treatments and other ways of healing us before we, as a last resort, turn to Him.

Being joyful in the face of a medical problem that feels overwhelming is not something many of us even consider, but one of Jesus’ disciples said that we should “count it all as Joy”, the good and the bad days. If you have given your life to Jesus and are walking through the world feeling sad or even angry because of a prayer that hasn’t been answered, ask Him to show you why it hasn’t been. God uses the good days and the bad days to give us strength and increase our faith. We may not like the way He does it but we will see the outcome one day and realize that it was for our good and His glory that it happened that way. Seek Him today and know that He loves each of us warts and all.

He is enough.

Temporary are our lives


We are living a life that is so fleeting that it is described as a puff of smoke, why do we think we have plenty of time to accept Jesus Christ as our Savior? If you have asked Jesus into your heart but you are still living the life of a sinner, one that doesn’t look like a Christian life, then you are fooling yourself by saying “I am a Christian”.

When Jesus is truly asked into someone’s life and heart and it is sincere…there is a change that comes over your heart. Yes, you will slip up and say things that you shouldn’t but you will be convicted by the Holy Spirit, that what you said or did is wrong. You feel the wrongness of it because you do belong to Him. If you never feel that conviction, then you don’t belong to Him and you are not saved.

Saying a prayer and having someone tell you that you are a Christian doesn’t save you. If your behavior doesn’t change, then you haven’t received Jesus as your Savior. There is always a change in your life and your heart when Jesus comes in to be your Savior. Your life changes because the Holy Spirit comes into your life and into your heart and you are saved by believing in Him and the sacrifice that He gave His Life for all of us and it is a gift from God through faith in Him by our acceptance of Jesus as our Savior.

Outsider?


Do you feel like you are an outsider at times? All of us were at one time but God chooses people, even outsiders or those who feel that they are unworthy, in the way that He wishes. God chooses each of us when He deems that we are ready and useful. Sometimes, His call on our lives is the very thing that will change us and make us ready to follow Him. Sometimes His call on our lives does change us in radical ways. We become His followers and His Spirit changes us so much that “we are a new creation” from that point on.

We are changed in our heart and in our soul because of the Holy Spirit’s work after we have accepted Him as our Savior. From that point on we are “made new” in Him. Our witness for Him will be changed and so will our lives be changed when we learn and read the Bible and learn how we can serve Him from this point on. Many people think that our lives in Christ will just stay that way but we should sanctify our lives by studying His Word and learning more about Him and about our place in His ministry

The Bible is our guide to knowing how to serve God and be useful to Him. We must read it and study it every day, not just on Sunday at church. Being a Christian, a follower of Jesus, is not an easy task like many people think it is. Belief in Jesus is easy but following Him every day of our lives from that point on is not easy because much of the world and many people we are around during the week don’t make it easy. Even our “old self” is still at odds with the new person that we are living as Christ-followers, so we struggle to keep the old sins from overpowering our new way of life.

God loves each of us, whether we believe in Him or have asked Jesus to save us. Life has a way of confusing our outlook toward becoming more like Jesus, because we feel that we are truly at odds with our new nature when the Holy Spirit has changed us to be a new person in Christ. That is why we need to read God’s Word after we become Christians. We have the Holy Spirit that will help us understand His ways while we read it and the understanding will come later. Salvation comes the moment we accept Jesus as our Savior, we have the Holy Spirit in our heart from that moment on molding us into the person God intends for us to be but the understanding doesn’t come immediately. It is only after we have read His Word and prayed over it, sometimes for years, that the “light” will come on and we begin to understand the why and the reason for our salvation and the struggles that come with it.

So it is our job to learn more about Him and to do that we need to study His Word daily. Even a chapter every day will get you through the Bible and help you to understand more about who you and I are in Christ. Many pastors and churches don’t tell us that we have to study to grow in our Christian walk. The body of Christ, the church, should be involved in teaching new Christians to be more involved in reading the Bible and learning about God and our place in the church, the Body of Christ.

Seek to know Jesus as your Savior if you aren’t sure of your salvation. He died for you and we should put our old self to death and live for Him until the day that He comes for His Bride.

Be blessed…


Christians are blessed by God IF they follow His teachings but if you follow “someone or something” else then you will be cursed. Sounds harsh doesn’t it? God’s curse can come in many forms, such as a sickness or even the loss of a job. God doesn’t seek ways to curse you but when you are working against Him by living your life for someone or something else then His curse will fall on you in some way.

Many people in the world don’t think they are turning away from God. Many don’t believe in Him in the first place because they live in a culture that chooses a different “Savior” to worship. The problem with this is that there aren’t other deity’s. Satan has been hard at work over the centuries to cause others to worship him or some of the fallen angels that were kicked out of Heaven millennia ago.

God loves humanity regardless of where you live or the culture that you live in and He calls many people to be His children. Sometimes those who are called choose not to answer their calling, but if you are predestined to be His then it may take a while but you will give your life to Him. God knows who will answer and who will not so it doesn’t surprise Him when you choose to be your own helper rather than seek His help.

We are coming to the end of the “Church age” soon so you need to seek Jesus and give your life to Him because when the church is taken up, the seven years of Tribulation will begin and it will be even harder to give your life to Jesus at that point. Don’t wait, if you want to stay out of hell, give your life and your heart to Jesus today because tomorrow may be too late.

Why do you go to church?


If you have given your heart and your life to Jesus, you should be going to church to learn more about your Savior and your part in His Kingdom. Does a preacher tell you these things? No, but studying the Bible does and you usually do that from listening to a preacher’s sermon from a scripture in the Bible that God has placed in his heart to preach from. If you are trying to learn your place in God’s Kingdom, that is the place to start. Whether you hear it from a “TV preacher” or from a local church doesn’t matter but you can ask questions when you are at a local church.

The Bible says that we should not “forsake the gathering of the saints” and if you are a born-again Christian then you are a saint of God’s Kingdom. Many people seem to think that they can worship from a boat while fishing or from a tree-stand while hunting and in some small way you can appreciate God’s Creation while doing these things but it is not true worship.

Worship is a state of mind and heart that you cannot achieve while hunting or fishing. You can be in a prayerful state of mind while driving down the highway because I do this every time I’m on the road but that isn’t the same as worshiping the Lord while learning from His Word. As His adopted children, we are supposed to learn as much as possible about Him as we can and the only way to do this is by studying the Bible and most of us need a Bible-study leader to help us to do this. It isn’t a skill that we are given when we become believers. Growing in your life as a Christian, deepening the relationship with your Savior can only be done by studying the Bible.

Get into it a chapter at a time. Pray about what you have read and if you have questions, find a pastor or a friend who knows Jesus and ask them to help you understand. The Bible is a book that can teach you and me so much about God and about Jesus and what our responsibility is in our walk with Jesus every day. Even if you have read the Bible all the way through, read it again because the Holy Spirit will teach you even more about what you have already read. Each verse will show you something that you didn’t see or understand before and you will grow in your walk as you learn more from Him each day.

Forgiveness


Be grateful that God doesn’t stay angry with us because all of us deserve it. God loves us which is why He sent Jesus to pay the penalty for our sins.